The game play is amazing and the graphics are awesome as well. This is probably one of my favorite TR games I ever played. Definitely worth checking into if you like this kind of game. Two thumbs up baby!!

Shadow of the Tomb Raider's focus is on puzzles and exploration, not combat. Despite having enough of the second one. While I enjoyed this game, I didn't like the immersion setting where people speak their native languages while Lara speaks English.
P.S.: Do NOT forget to pet the llamas!

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🔲 My grandma could play it
☑️ Easy
☑️ Normal
☑️ Hard
🔲 A challenge to be reckoned
🔲 In the heat of confrontation, (Only PVP games)


🔲 MS Paint
🔲 Bad
🔲 Meh
🔲 Normal
🔲 Very Good
🔲 An original artistic direction
☑️ Beautiful
🔲 Masterpiece


🔲 This game has no story
🔲 Basic element of the contractual requirements
🔲 It's there for people who want it
☑️ Well written
🔲 Leading to more in-depth researches/thoughts
🔲 A model to get inspired by


🔲 0 (No story)
🔲 Short
☑️ Average
🔲 Long
🔲 To infinity and beyond


🔲 Just filling noises/No music
🔲 Trivial and uneventful
☑️ Good and/or fitting the game's artistic dispositions
🔲 Memorable
🔲 Transcending whispers of a forgotten world


🔲 I would rather watch paint dry
🔲 Hard to enjoy
🔲 Repetitive and/or uninspired
☑️ A good moment
🔲 Sticking out of the pack
🔲 You will remember it long after


🔲 A one-time experience
☑️ For achievements
🔲 If you wait a few months/years (or with mods)
🔲 Definitely
🔲 Infinitely replayable (or almost)


🔲 Never heard of
☑️ Minor bugs (Nothing gamebreaking. In the worst case, move to the main menu and re-enter the game.)
🔲 Can get annoying
🔲 Impacts the player's experience badly
🔲 The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs


🔲 You can run it on a microwave (or a toaster based on steam!)
🔲 Low
☑️ Average
🔲 High
🔲 NASA computer


🔲 Free
🔲 Underpriced
🔲 Perfect Price
☑️ Could be cheaper (At the moment, I am only seeing it as a bundle in steam.)
🔲 Overpriced
🔲 Complete waste of money


🔲 No
🔲 If you have nothing else to play
☑️ Wait for sale
☑️ Yes


🔲 It's a completely different game
🔲 This game is a scam
🔲 It's missing many features they announced
☑️ Looks very similar to the steam page
🔲 Better than expected and/or announced
🔲 Masterpiece, no patch or feature has to be added.


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🔲 2
🔲 3
🔲 4
🔲 5
🔲 6
☑️ 7
🔲 8
🔲 9
🔲 10


Thank you for taking the time to read and think about this review.

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👎Extremely boring.
The plot is nothing new. Same trinity. Same daddy issues. Same adventures where Lara becomes completely miserable, then she becomes a complete bad ass, then completely miserable again and so on a few times. No unexpected plot twists. Nothing.

👎Full of bugs.
Here's my favorite one: in one of the tombs that you raid during the main story there is place where you have to rotate pillars with a wheel. But when you rotate that wheel - the pillars don't rotate. You know how do you fix it? Enable VSync, to lower down a frame rate a bit. Because for some reason, when you have a high frame rate - the pillars don't rotate.
But that's just the tip of the icebrg. There are all sorts of bugs. Missing character models. Not working HDR (the slider is broken). Parkour jumps that don't trigger proper result. You name it.

👎Characters are dull.
Seriously, they are boring. I'm not even bringing up that this whole game is feminism propaganda (all the good leading characters are women, all the evil leading characters are men; I dig it, that's okay, woman have to be empowered). The characters are just plain simply boring. Even the main villain who's story was supposed to be ambiguous and difficult turned out to be... Boring.
And the poor animations and dialogues for the side missions only emphasize that feeling of boredom. I literally skipped half the side quest dialogues, because of how badly they were paced. And that's coming from me, a person who mostly plays video games for their stories.
The right hand guy of our main villain is not shown at all. We kinda know about him. He kinda knows about Lara. And then he dies. Not from Lara's hand.
Oh and both the characters from the side quests and the NPC's are all the same. They look identical. There is probably around 6 or 7 models of paititi villagers that are reused all over the place and in the side quests. At first you try to distinguish them, but then you give up. It's impossible and not worth trying.

👎Gameplay is lame
You start with a set of skills and tools that you kind of got used to in the previous two games. Then they remove part of those skills, but return them to you back very soon. And then you get to a place where you have to spend 70% of your time and you can only use your bow and only part of the costumes are allowed. And after you reach that point - there is almost no game-play progress. Nothing really changes. Really bad pacing. No sense of progress whatsoever.
And yeah. My special guest of honor is a weird merchant who spawns randomly in one of the few predefined places (you guessed it - they aren't marked on the map, you have to run in circles trying to find her), who sells two unique tools - a lock pick and rope ascender (that is actually not used to ascend ropes). And you know what those tools are for? A lock pick allows you to open a very limited amount of treasure chests, that contain some gold (and that are required to open for an achievement). Rope ascender allows you to brake a total amount of 3 walls all over the game, that have a gold ore hidden behind those walls. If you care about achievement - go ahead, buy a lockpick. But don't even bother buying a rope ascender. It's absolutely useless.
Tombs themselves are repetitive and become boring somewhere after a third one.
Shooting locations are very limited and almost always play out the same.

👎Dialogues are lifeless
You know what really works bad, in terms of sounds? When the character speaks to you really closely in half their voice and then starts yelling really loudly with a top of their lungs - but both of those sounds have the same volume. It sucks. I can hear the tone change. But it does not really feels as if the character is shouting. Did they really had to equalize the volume of all dialogue lines? That's one of the examples. There are a lot of those. And their quantity multiplies around side quests scenes.
The lines of both Lara and NPCs around the game are lifeless and unemotional. They sound completely scripted and out of context.
You could try and enable the local language setting (that allows characters to speak in their native language), but that only makes everything worse. Because you would expect them to speak their native language and Lara struggling speaking their language too, but instead you have natives speaking their language and Lara speaking English - and both sides understand each other without any issues (even the Paititi tribe, that never actually seen the outer world).

👎Difficulty settings are ok-ish
In general they are ok, but there is just one thing I would like to point out. The setting of the "Puzzle Difficulty". You have "Normal" which triggers Lara to say the same line every time you toggle Survival Instincts during a puzzle and then there is "Hard" which disables those annoying comments but also disables the Survival instincts. That is extremely annoying. Why can't I enjoy the puzzle in peace but have the interactable objects highlighted at the same time. Why do I have to hear that "I have to open that gate somehow" every time I try to look for a collectible around me? Extremely annoying.

👍Graphics are mostly very good
The only good thing about this game is graphics. When you don't look at the unrealistically perfect Lara's face (that after spending so much time in the open air and being always bruised don't even have a single wrinkle) and if you manage to get HDR working.

To summarize: I'd give this game 4/10. I'd rather play 2013's Tomb Raider three times in a row than replay Shadow of the Tomb Raider.